I got into NES programming about a month ago, just in time to begin the 2016 competition. I've never done any 6502 or anything for the NES, so I'm glad I can actually contribute something as a NESDev member finally.

I like Windjammers for Neo-Geo a lot, but it's only available legally for hard-to-access hardware (Neo-Geo MVS, AES, and NGCD). I thought it would be fun to make a new game in the spirit of Windjammers, in the way that Overwatch is a game that is done in the spirit of Team Fortress 2. In other words, I don't wish to make a direct clone, but rather try to capture what's fun about Windjammer's game design and mechanics, and make something new.

For several reasons the graphics and sound design will be different from Windjammers. I'm using UNROM/UOROM, with CHR RAM, and I've planned out how much VRAM space each character is alloewd so any two arbitrary character choices may be made without aligning character graphics to CHR ROM banks. I'm writing the whole thing in 6502 assembly, and although I am completely new to it this game isn't particularly complicated with regards to action on-screen, so I think the NES hardware can handle my less-than-stellar 6502 code. Furthermore, the PPU should handle a game like this with little to no flickering.

I'm an insane fan of Windjammers (one of the best Neo-Geo games, IMO), so I'll be watching this thread.

Edit...Actually, I couldn't help but think about this some more...

You had mentioned in the other thread that #35 may be the only skin tone present in the game?

Looking at your screenshot, I suspect that you might be reluctant to vary skin tones due to limited sprite palettes (I'm counting: Black, Pink, White for flesh and shirt - Black, Red, Pink for P2 skirt - Black, Blue, Pink for P1 skirt - and - Black, Blue, White for puck) But even school girls don't play sports in skirts. It's impractical. They have P.E. clothes, so the need to have two colors of clothing for each character seemed superfluous.

Using tennis, volleyball, or normal schoolyard P.E. uniforms as a basis, you could easily free up unique palettes for both players and also put the girls in something far more socially acceptable for sports.

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Here are five skintones, #17, #27, #36, #37, #35. I also put in a few hairstyles as choices (By using shorts for male and female players, you may save some tiles). By mixing and matching uniform palettes, skintones, hairstyles, and gender, you could incorporate a very basic, but pretty robust character creator in the game as well.

No, sorry my wording was unclear. What I meant is $35 is one of many, but that one alone is subject to many interpretations.

The only limitation is that the two players have one shared palette ($35, a white, and a black color) as well as one character-specific palette. For a character to have a different skin tone, it necessitates the use of the character-specific palette. That's fine, but then it kind of limits the whole character to one palette instead of two.

I may think about making the disc only black-and-white, which would then allow each player to have two distinct sprite palettes allocated. That would allow completely arbitrary skin color choices at the whim of the player.

Last edited by mikejmoffitt on Sun May 29, 2016 10:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Here are five skintones, #17, #27, #36, #37, #35. I also put in a few hairstyles as choices (By using shorts for male and female players, you may save some tiles). By mixing and matching uniform palettes, skintones, hairstyles, and gender, you could incorporate a very basic, but pretty robust character creator in the game as well.

That was pretty much the plan. The top and bottom half of the existing character is separated by palette, so having that be swappable was going to be an easy choice anyway.

The current character is completely a placeholder - it's little more than an edit of the main sprite from Valis, and likely not slated for inclusion. I was thinking of having many more strange characters, but 16x7 tiles per player doesn't leave a ton of room so something simpler like you suggested is probably what's going to end up happening.

That all sounds great. Glad to hear the characters will likely have independent palettes. Even without sacrificing a unique puck sprite, I think it's worth the reduction in different bottoms / tops (Also, then, you don't have to worry about having the waist always divide at a tile intersection.) Anyway, I look forward to seeing what your original players will look like.

A few modifications later and I have it divided such that I can at least offer shoe colors to break out of having just four colors per player. I had your PE uniform mockup visible as a reference when making the modifications here, so I ohpe you don't mind the similarity. I only had to edit my mappings a little, and I solved a mistake I made earlier where the player's leg was 1 pixel thinner than it should be.

But even school girls don't play sports in skirts. It's impractical. They have P.E. clothes.

Your experience may vary with mine, but lots of girls wore skirts in P.E. where I went to school (P.E. uniforms aren't a universal thing), not to mention they might wear whatever they like when playing sports outside of school. Some of the girls team uniforms required skirts, too.

I've seen plenty of top level atheletes wear skirts while playing, too, so I don't think this criticism has a good foundation at all.

Skorts are yet another option. I'm not trying to say what is "most common", I'm saying that it's really not unusual to find women wearing skirts while playing sports. To say that they don't is blatantly incorrect.

There are plenty of sports teams today that have a skirt uniform (e.g. common in women's field hockey), and shorts aren't universally better than a skirt in every situation. Lots of people prefer to do active stuff in skirts for whatever reason, be it about physical feel, habit, or just fashion sense, or maybe it's after school and they didn't want to go home and change. It's not just a simple no-brainer, and they really aren't particularly impractical either.

In my initial justification I'd thought of Tennis, where skirted shorts are common. As I've already more or less created a variant with shorts, nothing stops me from offering both as variants. The real challenge I will be facing is fitting all of the animation frames in. I will have to do some very careful re-use of tile data and CHR-tetris to make an individual character fit in a 16x7 tile CHR-RAM slot. That only leaves the top 16x2 rows open for the disc, which eats half, and a few tiny other things (disc shadow, and possibly a dust particle effect).

Fortunately, things like score, etc. are drawn to the nametable so eating all of my sprite space with characters should be fine.

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